Catch of the day

Stowe is about 135 miles as the seagull flies from the nearest ocean, and a seven-hour round trip to Boston, so the journey to bring back the freshest fish possible isn’t exactly a quick one.

But Stowe Seafood, which has been a fixture on the town’s food scene since the 1980s, makes at least two of those trips a week to bring fresh fish to the mountains.

Ed Flanagan, the owner, sent me to the Hub with longtime employee and driver Niles Zumberge. “Get here at 7:30,” Flanagan told me, “and wear good boots.”

To the sea

At about 7:35 a.m., we take off in a refrigerated white box truck with the Stowe Seafood logo on each side. Luckily, the cab is warm; heavy snow blankets the road. We pass several vehicles that have slid off the road, and it gets slick and windy near the Montpelier exit. Niles assures me it will clear up once we pass Randolph. Sure enough, the snow turns to cold rain as we pass Exit 4, and the white, icy landscape rolls into dusky green and brown as we continue south.

The first stop, at about 11 a.m., is the Crystal Cold Storage freezer warehouse just outside Boston. The large, nondescript, tan brick building, amid rows of similar structures, has 12 large bay doors for trucks. The Stowe Seafood truck is dwarfed by 18-wheelers bearing the names of restaurants and bakeries. Inside the warehouse, it’s cold. Really cold. Small forklifts zip around, laden with pallets of frozen goodies — shrimp, lobster tails, smile-shaped potato nuggets. Charlie, who’s supervising our order, chats easily with Niles — they see each other every week.

“Hey, is it snowing up there yet?” Charlie asks. “I can’t wait to ski!”

Wearing a knit balaclava and a full zip-up snowsuit, he’s practically ready for the mountain. The only people not dressed against the chill are two women in the small upstairs office, decorated with a colorfully lit tree.

Niles said it took him a few trips to realize there was a warm room to wait in; when you’re standing still in the warehouse, it gets nippy.

We retreat to the truck to phone home — the first stop is almost always the same, but the rest of the day’s itinerary is determined by the orders that Ed calls in during the next few hours. Once the frozen order is on the truck, and with a list of stops in hand, we head seaward over the Zakim bridge.

No-haggle zone

We pass glossy apartments and high-rises on the way to long, low cement buildings in the Marine Industrial Park, where the historic Boston Fish Pier juts into the ocean. At the center is a large gray building resembling a courthouse flanked by two long brick buildings bearing signs proclaiming “100 YEARS” in large, red letters.

I hoped for haggling in loud New England voices, fish whizzing through the air in a whirlwind of scales and fins, burly men in cable-knit sweaters brandishing nets full of writhing cod, heaps of glistening shells and clacking claws.

That’s not quite the case. The Boston fish market is a well-organized, multifaceted, quiet machine, with a sprawling patchwork of wholesalers and warehouses carpeting the city.

The fish itself comes in early in the morning, the price is agreed upon at auction, and the catch is distributed to hundreds of wholesale purveyors. Rather than going to the main pier and picking up a variety of product, the Stowe Seafood truck trundles around southern Boston for the better part of the day, stopping at a series of businesses, no haggling or prodding required.

‘Our new driver’

The first stop is Point Judith Shellfish Co.: a small, cold room with huge wheeled buckets of ice and drains in the floor. Niles picks up bags of Rhode Island-harvested clams and huge oysters, some almost as big as my outstretched hand.

The son of the original owner runs the company today, and Niles tells him, “This is our new driver,” gesturing to me. The guy gives me a skeptical look and a hint of a smile. There aren’t a lot of women on the fish beat, it seems — in the course of the day, I see several in offices and just a few on the working floor, actually handling the fish.

Many of the wholesale food companies are family-owned, with generations working congruently— one cousin might be up the street, butchering steer; another is a few blocks away making sausages. Everybody seems to know Niles, though — he’s been driving for Stowe Seafood for 10 years.

The pattern establishes as we drive to other establishments: check in, wait a bit, load the truck, move on. The warehouses vary in size but are similar in appearance — wet blue floors and cold white walls, separated from the entrance/office areas by heavy plastic curtains that slap you on the back as you pass through. There’s as much ice as there is fish.

Many houses have their own ice rooms, with huge machines mounted above platforms churning out mountains of crushed ice into wheeled bins. It’s chilly and damp, inside and out, and I am glad for my tall waterproof boots and warm layers underneath my jacket.

Not just fish

While the main haul of the day is seafood, there are other foods, too — the Stowe shop features meat, chicken and a handful of produce offerings.

Niles collects brown paper packages of whole ribeyes, pork loin, sweet and hot sausages; a case of lemons, some veggies, five pounds of onions. A case of herring and a box of chicken backs are destined for some lucky pups at a German shepherd breeder in Wolcott.

While waiting for one order, Niles tells me about a salty fellow who works at a nearby warehouse and apparently has lived for years in an RV in the parking lot. It sounds like an urban legend, but a peek across the street reveals the vintage vehicle. With long, hard days of work in the warehouses, I’m not surprised.

A lot of product passes through the warehouses in Boston, and a lot of people make it happen. In each office, the phones ring constantly. The smaller places might have one or two rooms, with one person at the desk and a couple of people handling and processing the goods; bigger places have multiple processing rooms and dozens of cutters, pickers, packers and movers. Many of the workers are immigrants, mostly men, ranging in age from early 20s to 40s.

Seafood is a perishable commodity that requires a good deal of handling before it reaches the customer perfectly cleaned, packed neatly into containers and free of the bones, shell bits and scales that many home cooks would rather not deal with.

Sometimes, it’s hard to find people to do that work. The prices have gone up at one New England-based crab company because of production problems. The high-end product requires careful picking, and the amount of labor necessary is evident as I walk past towers of big blue containers, dripping and teeming with empty shells.

Fish almost flung

The closest thing I found to the shanty-singing, fish-flinging fantasy was at Red’s Best, where two men flanked a hot-tub-sized bucket of skate. Long, hooked sticks called gaffs flashed in and out of the pile, slippery wings flying into smaller containers.

Also notable was Boston Sword and Tuna, a fourth-generation company that prides itself on high-quality scallops, tuna, swordfish and salmon, each type funneled through separate, specialized rooms.

One room was full of nothing but creamy white scallops, piled like tiny snowballs into tubs and packed into waxed boxes. Four men worked skillfully with needle-nosed pliers in the salmon room, removing pinbones from beautiful orange-fleshed Norwegian salmon sides. Another room was laid with pallets bearing huge, headless tuna, and upon each dark, yellow-spiked form lay one small crescent of meat and a straw-shaped core sample, ranging in colors from translucent pink to deep ruby red. A serious-looking man paused in his work to shuffle something around in a box, leading me over to peer into the container, breaking into a wide smile as I came face-to-face with a severed fish head the size of a tire, with a glistening, saucer-sized eye.

“Moonfish!” he exclaimed, laughing as I gaped.

Orders waiting

The truck was packed to the gills as we left Boston. Back home, employee Colby Grant met us at the shop in Stowe and fanned out about 25 slips of paper — orders from local restaurants and shops, to be parceled out and packed up for morning delivery. About two-thirds of the store's business is wholesale, providing product for local restaurants and shops including Piecasso, Phoenix, Ten Acres Bistro, Harrison's, Mac's Market, Moog's Place, Cork, Three Penny Taproom, Hunger Mountain Co-op and more.

Glimmering sides of mahi mahi, a rainbow of salmon, four kinds of oysters, beef and sausages were swiftly dispatched into neat piles, and soon it was all wrapped up.

In three days, it will all happen again.

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Stowe Seafood Q&A

Owner Ed Flanagan gets mathematical.

1. How much fish does Stowe Seafood sell per year?

We sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 75,000 pounds of seafood, meat and poultry last year.

2. How many vendors do you do business with?

We buy from approximately 25 vendors in Boston, 15 or so on a regular basis. We deal with about another 12 vendors on the retail front alone.

We have been doing business with about 10 of those vendors since 1996.

3. How did you get into this business? 

I started working at Stowe Seafood on a very part time basis in 1997, for Mike Saffron and Rob Darling. My role under them grew over five years and when they wanted to sell the business, in 2002, I bought it.

4. What's the busiest time at the shop? 

July and August are our busiest two months of the year, but the two weeks around Christmas and New Year’s is our craziest time. We sell more product in that 10–14 day span than at any other time of year.

5. How do you choose what product to buy and sell?

Some items that we sell we have sold from day one and have every day. Some of the seafood and fish we sell is based on seasonality. We try to source things like Nantucket Bay scallops, striped bass, shad roe, soft shell crabs etc. when they are in season. Some other things we source more in summer or winter months depending on strength of sales at those times, i.e. hot dogs in summer, beef short ribs in winter. We are also open to customers' suggestions for items. If something sells we’ll keep bringing it in; if not — we tried!

Bonus: Tell us about Shrimp Crew (a special team of people brought in to clean, cook and peel holiday shrimp orders).

Shrimp Crew?! Craziness!!! Filling holiday orders! A huge part of our business at Christmas and New Year’s. It gets pretty silly around here and most of our regulars can attest to that! We work long and hard filling holiday orders, but it’s all part of what makes things work. We received our first Christmas order back in September this year, and it was a sizeable one!